http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | There is a myth in the American media. It goes like this: The
good scientists agree that global warming is human-induced and would be
addressed if America ratified the Kyoto global warming pact, while bad,
heretical scientists question climate models that predict Armageddon because
they are venal and corrupted by oil money.

A Tuesday Open Forum piece in The San Francisco Chronicle,
written by a UC Berkeley journalism professor and a UC Berkeley energy
professor, provides a perfect example of this odd view that all scientists
ascribe to a common gospel: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), a U.N.-sponsored group of more than 2,000 scientists from more than
100 countries, has concluded that human activity is a key factor in elevated
carbon-dioxide levels and rising temperatures and sea levels that could
prove catastrophic for tens of millions of people living along Earth's
coastlines."

The piece also cited research by "Naomi Oreskes, a science
historian at UC San Diego, who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed
articles on climate change published in scientific journals between 1993 and
2003 and could not find a single one that challenged the scientific
consensus that human-caused global warming is real."

The authors then attacked best-selling author Michael Crichton
because Crichton accepted an invitation to testify from Sen. James Inhofe,
R-Okla., "who is heavily supported by oil and gas interests" and who 
horrors  dared to ask whether the global-warming scare is a hoax. That is
the sort of McCarthyist guilt by association that one would not expect to
encounter in the name of science.

Crichton spoke at an Independent Institute event Tuesday night
with three apostate scientists. It's odd that Oreskes couldn't find a single
article that didn't follow the thin green line on global warming. Panelist
and Colorado State University professor of atmospheric science William M.
Gray, a hurricane authority, announced that he thinks that the biggest
contributor to global warming is the fact that "we're coming out of a little
ice age," and that the warming trend will end in six to eight years.

Said Gray, sagely, "Consensus science isn't science." No lie. In
fact, it's a bizarre argument. Why do global-warming believers keep pushing
this everyone-agrees line when consensus uber alles is so, well, unacademic?
The ideal should not be scientists who think in lockstep, but those in the
proud mold of the skeptic, who takes a hard look at the data and proves
conventional wisdom wrong.

Independent Institute President David Theroux hailed that trait
in this year's winner of Nobel Prize for medicine, Barry Marshall, who
believed ulcers were caused by bacteria, when the establishment knew that
Marshall's theory was "preposterous"  except that Marshall turned out to
be right.

Crichton focused on the many times that fad science has been
wrong. Remember Y2K? Ho-hum. The population-bomb scare? Yawn. Then there's
Yellowstone, the national park that declined due to rangers' misbegotten
(and often fatal for the wildlife) conviction that they knew what was best
for the animals  in this case, they killed wolves and overprotected elk
until the whole ecosystem suffered.

On Tuesday, Inhofe issued a statement from Capitol Hill that
noted how scientists with independent views don't get on too well with the
IPCC. Witness Chris Landsea of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, who resigned from the IPCC this year because he believed an
IPCC top hurricane scientist wrongly linked severe hurricanes to global
warming. As a result, he wrote, "the IPCC process has been subverted and
compromised, its neutrality lost."

I've seen this when covering failed educational fads: Curriculum
boards chase out the free thinkers, then smugly announce that all the
experts agree with them  so they must be right.

What did Gray think of the Oreskes report? "It shows you how
we've all been brainwashed."

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.